An obvious and large opportunity exists in the mobile phone market. At present, developing mobile phone apps requires a development team to obtain specialized skills in either Java/Linux for Google’s Android or Objective C for Apple’s iOS.
A code generator that can output to both Java and Objective C, combined with an abstraction layer, would appear to be an obvious winner.
Clearly, this is a difficult problem to solve, but one that would none the less have huge market potential.
Update: July 16, 2010
OK, so I need to publish an update to this post. As soon as I clicked Submit I came across several companies that are going after this exact opportunity. So here they are:
Appcelerator’s Titanium: http://www.appcelerator.com (Open Source, licensed under the Apache Public License v2)
PhoneGap: http://www.phonegap.com(Open Source, licensed under MIT License)
MoSync: http://www.mosync.com
RhoMobile: http://rhomobile.com (Open Source, licensed under GPL v3)
I’m sure there are more, but this is what I’ve come across. Haven’t used any yet, so no feedback on which, if any, of these options are acceptable.
If you’d like more info check out Savio Rodrigues’ post on cross-platform mobile development using open source platforms: http://saviorodrigues.wordpress.com/2009/06/08/building-native-mobile-applications-with-open-source-mobile-platforms
